The Problems with Overpricing Your Home

Why is overpricing your home a bad idea?

You’ve decided to sell your New Orleans home. You’ve cleaned and decluttered. Everything is polished and shining and you’re ready for the agent to show up and get that beauty photographed and on the market. All has been prepped and the only thing left to do is determine your listing price.

At this moment, you are truly afraid of leaving money on the table, so the temptation to price it high to leave room to negotiate down is HUGE.

Don’t do that.

Why not?

Increased time on market

Every real estate statistic in the world will show you that houses that are overpriced stay on the market exponentially longer. Buyers have a wealth of information available to them before they make an offer, including what every house in your neighborhood sold for. Price it too high and you run the risk of people just passing it by because they already know it’s unreasonable.

Showing stress

Do you like stressing over leaving your home in “show ready” condition every morning before you go to work? Do you like last minute phone calls that require you to scurry away during dinner time? Do your pets just adore being kenneled day after day? If so, go ahead and plan to deal with all of this and more while you’re on the market for that increased time mentioned above.

Additional mortgage payments

A bonus to more time on the market? More mortgage payments to make. You’ll eat up the cost of those price reductions every single time you have to write a check to your mortgage company. Would you rather price your home $10,000 lower to start with or make 5 additional $2,000 a month payments?

Appraisal issues

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find a really enthusiastic buyer that’s willing to overlook comparable sales and offer you that higher price. The appraiser, however, won’t share the buyer’s enthusiasm. The appraiser’s job is to provide the bank with hard data on comparable homes that have sold in the last 6 months and give their opinion of value. Renegotiating an entire contract because the value came in low is not on anyone’s to-do list.

The people most likely to buy won’t even see it

When searching for a home, most online shoppers start with their price range. If your home should be priced at $300,000, but you insist on $350,000, the folks searching in the $300,000 range won’t even see it in their results.

How to avoid overpricing

Hire an experienced agent

A professional agent understands the local market conditions and can provide you all of the information you need to determine the right listing price that will get you an offer and allow you to move on to the next phase of your life.

Don’t let real estate sites influence your listing price

Those Zillow Zestimates? They aren’t worth the screen space. New Orleans property data is not accessible by these 3rd party sites, so their best guess of your home’s worth is just that – a big old guess. They even tell you in the fine print that their margin of error in New Orleans is extremely high.